Aim of the project

We want to see which information the YouTube algorithm is showing to people. This algorithms is responsible for more than 700,000,000 hours of watch time every day, and it is not fully understood, even by the people who build it.

What are “recommended videos” on YouTube?

Recommended videos appear in the “Up next” list on the right of the screen. (“When autoplay is enabled, a suggested video will automatically play next.”)

How did you identify YouTube’s most often recommended videos?

We used a multi-step program to analyze videos recommended by its algorithm every day

Step 1: We start from a list of 1000+ US channels (these channels are listed below)

Step 2: We gather all recommended videos from the last video uploaded by these channels

Step 3: We compute which channel was recommended the most from those videos

Step 4: We repeat step 2 and 3 until we have gathered recommendations from 2000 channels

Step 5: For each video that was observed, we count and display from how many channels it was recommended